One of the best things that has happened to the Brewers in the last eight years just might be the burden of expectations.

You might recall 2005, the first non-losing season for the forlorn organization in 13 years. The 81-81 record was an icebreaker, the first indication that a small-market team could actually compete in an uncapped sport.

In these last eight years, the Brewers have played .507 baseball and have made MLB's discriminating playoffs twice in the previous four seasons.

The response was unprecedented relative to market size. From 2007 until last year, the Brewers drew 3 million customers a year three times. For doing things the right way, they were maybe the per-capita attendance leaders of the known universe and certainly appreciated as much as any professional sports franchise in North America.

I wouldn't go as far as to say that fans accustomed to failure became spoiled, because one divisional flag in 29 years doesn't have quite the same effect as multiple world championships up in the Fox Valley, but they certainly became demanding.

Which was a good thing, indeed. You finally get a taste of baseball the way it's supposed to be played while paying for the stadium, and it has a way of elevating expectations to the point that anything less than competitive behavior should not be tolerated.

Which brings us to this intolerable season.

Enough evidence is in to know that it's not going to get any better, although it could definitely get worse. This is who the 2013 Brewers are, sort of a Triple-A roster — with notable exceptions such as Jean Segura and Carlos Gomez — filled in with once-productive veterans who are too hurt to either play or produce.

So the far more preferable burden-of-expectations mind-set that replaced outright apathy eight years ago is howling for accountability to the point that momentum is beginning to build for the idea that someone should be fired.

But in this case, that's the downside of the kind of scrutiny more than a few MLB teams would welcome.

I've seen some bad acts and bad fits come through here. Ron Roenicke is neither. His knowledge of the game, understanding of the manager's role and people skills have not diminished since the Brewers won 96 games and the division in his first season two years ago. He is not only very good at what he does, he has shown no sign of losing control under the impossible conditions of injuries and the stopgap minor leaguers with whom he is asked to compete against legitimate rosters.

A manager's most important job is to put players in the best possible positions to succeed, which is kind of hard to do when you don't have the players. If the Brewers fired Roenicke, it would be one of those change-for-change-sake moves. And it would be a mistake.

Doug Melvin is most responsible in that the replacement players are not yet up to the job of winning major-league games. The farm system cannot begin to replace Ryan Braun and Corey Hart and Prince Fielder, a difficult concept to begin with and exacerbated by the Nashville revolving door that Roenicke must deal with on a daily basis.

But when Melvin's body of work is examined, one really bad year is hardly grounds for running him out of town. Few GMs in the game are equipped to deal with the realities and limitations of small-market baseball. If Melvin was smart enough to make the trades that twice got the Brewers to the playoffs, he's still the right guy to repeat what he did to get the franchise to a competitive level.

The Brewers are awful at the moment, but not 2002-type awful. Melvin assembled the pieces that culminated with a brush with the World Series two years ago. Judge him on what he does from here, not on a year in which everything that could go wrong did go wrong.

Expectations are a good thing, especially when they are combined with perspective, especially when they are aimed in the right direction.